Adoption
It is clear that the custom of adoption of children is not practised by the Todas. They denied its existence emphatically, and I met with no instance which led me to suspect its presence in compiling the genealogies.
If a child is left an orphan, it is looked after by the people of its clan, but it is always clearly recognised that the child retains the father’s property, and belongs to the madol and pòlm of the father.
There is, so far as I could ascertain, no religious custom which makes it necessary that a man should have children. The duties of a child at the funeral ceremonies can quite well be performed by some other member of the clan.
There is a social reason which makes it inconvenient in some cases that a man should die without male issue. If a man is the only representative of his kudr, and has no children, the kudr will become extinct, and the clan will be put to the trouble of rearranging the families of which it is constituted. If such a man is childless he may take another wife in the hope of having a son to carry on the kudr, but the adoption of a child for the purpose is never thought of. A good case is that of the two brothers Mudrigeidi and Odrkurs in Table I. They are the last two representatives of one kudr of the Nòdrsol. They have had two wives, one of whom has had a daughter and a boy who died, and in the [[550]]hope of having a son, one of the brothers had recently married a young girl, Obalidz, as his third wife, the others being still alive, though one had been taken by another man.